Real Coffee with Scott Adams - June 23, 2020


Episode 1036 Scott Adams: White-Looking Jesus, Fake News Being More Shameless Than Usual, Presidential Tweets


Episode Stats

Length

53 minutes

Words per Minute

147.77261

Word Count

7,865

Sentence Count

582

Misogynist Sentences

1

Hate Speech Sentences

11


Summary

It's the dopamine hit of the day, and it's the thing that makes everything better. It's also the weirdest thing to get retweeted by the president, because it's simultaneously big and small at the same time.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Hey anybody here today? Come on in. If I'm here you should be here. Yeah we got
00:00:14.220 stuff to talk about. Yes we do. And that will happen directly after the
00:00:19.560 simultaneous sip. I know you'll enjoy it. It's gonna be a good one. Now you might
00:00:26.160 wonder why I don't do the normal introduction to the simultaneous sip
00:00:30.960 today and there's a reason. I can't remember it. That's right. I read it every
00:00:35.920 single time. One of the tricks of writing is that things that you can read are
00:00:43.980 very different than things you read out loud. So if you're gonna write
00:00:48.240 something for the purpose of reading it out loud, if you're gonna be reading it
00:00:52.660 that's fine. But something you were gonna memorize and say, you might write it
00:00:57.040 differently. But we're gonna enjoy the simultaneous sip right now. Do you have a
00:01:04.840 cup? A mug? It's the dopamine hit of the day. The thing that makes everything
00:01:08.620 better. And you're getting ready for it. Now go. Good stuff. So last night I was
00:01:26.060 getting ready to go to sleep. Winding down. I was in bed and I thought to myself, I'll
00:01:33.100 check Twitter one more time. Here's what you should never do if you're trying to
00:01:39.100 wind down and go to sleep. Don't ever check Twitter right before you go to
00:01:44.800 sleep. It's a very bad sleep strategy. And so I open up Twitter and I see
00:01:53.800 somebody's making a comment that's referring to the president retweeting me,
00:01:58.580 which he did the day before yesterday. And I thought, oh, they're still talking
00:02:02.820 about this. This was the day before yesterday. But then I looked at the
00:02:06.500 comment. I thought, well, this doesn't seem like it's about that one. So I click on
00:02:10.160 it and he had retweeted me again. So it was the second retweet in two days. And I'm
00:02:17.100 thinking, well, aren't I pretty special? And then I saw another one. I thought, are you
00:02:24.820 kidding me? He retweeted me three times in two days? But it wasn't true. It was not
00:02:33.660 true that I got retweeted three times in two days by the president because it was
00:02:39.020 four. He tweeted me four times in the last 48 hours. We'll talk about those. And I got
00:02:47.820 to tell you, it's the weirdest experience to get retweeted by the president because
00:02:54.020 it's simultaneously big and small at the same time. So the big part is that he's the most
00:03:00.520 important politician on the planet. And even if it were not just the job of the president,
00:03:07.280 he's also the biggest personality and the biggest job. I mean, it's Trump, right? And
00:03:14.300 so when he tweets about you and he referred to me as interesting guy, I'm not sure if that's
00:03:19.940 my forever name yet. It doesn't have the crisp, insulting quality of his other nicknames.
00:03:28.680 So I don't know if I can call myself an interesting guy. It just needs to be a little more insulting.
00:03:35.820 So maybe I can ask him for that later. Can you give me a nickname that's just a little bit
00:03:40.080 derogatory? Because I don't think I can go with this one. It's not going to work. Anyway,
00:03:45.160 so that's the big part is that it's the biggest, you know, the most important personality in
00:03:49.460 the world who is apparently, I caught his attention four times in 48 hours. So that's
00:03:56.620 the big part. The small part is that when I'm experiencing it, it's just me and my phone.
00:04:04.160 You know, Christine is in another room. And it's just like, ah, just me and my phone. That's
00:04:10.540 it. So it's the weird combination of things. And then I woke up and saw a lot of comments
00:04:16.440 that other people saw. So we'll talk about those things in a minute. I tweeted yesterday
00:04:24.180 that if I ever become president, seems unlikely, but if I ever become president, I want to do
00:04:30.000 such a good job that the news is about stuff like drinking water with two hands, walking
00:04:40.160 down a ramp, tweeting about stuff. Have you noticed that the criticisms about Trump are
00:04:50.020 completely off topic of his job performance? Have you noticed that it happens kind of subtly
00:04:56.820 because we get so drawn into each story? It's hard to to look at the larger trend, you
00:05:02.320 know, you get lost in the details. But if you just rise up for a minute and look at the
00:05:06.760 headlines, let me call up. Let's just call up CNN randomly. Let's see. You see the types
00:05:15.060 of stories that are anti Trump. There's something about Breonna Keillor confronts Trump Trump campaign
00:05:25.520 saying, are dead Americans funny to you? All right. So the best, the best they could do is that
00:05:35.240 there's a campaign official who laughed about a joke. Okay. Here's another one. Trump takes first
00:05:43.500 trip to the border. So that's a nothing. First trip to the border in 2020. Okay. How about
00:05:50.580 fact checking Trump's mail-in vote fraud claims? All right. Let's check that. So John Avalon is
00:06:00.700 checking Trump's mail-in fraud claims. And as his source, he uses PolitiFact. So he refers
00:06:07.580 to PolitiFact and they have this little logo, you've probably seen it, that shows the meter
00:06:13.020 going from, you know, false to true. And if it's really false, it's like it's on fire. You know,
00:06:19.320 it's a lie. So PolitiFact is their source for CNN to fact check the president. So I thought to
00:06:25.840 myself, well, I wonder how credible they are. So I thought, I'll check the one thing that I know
00:06:32.540 what the truth is. And it's the fine people hoax. And everybody who reads the transcript knows the
00:06:40.020 truth. So this one's easy. You don't have to wonder what the truth is, because it's just
00:06:45.420 written right in front of you. There's no interpretation. It's pretty obvious. So you
00:06:50.400 should go to PolitiFact, presumably, if it's a credible outfit. And it will have this little
00:06:56.380 meter, which it does for all of its facts. And that fact will say the fine people hoax,
00:07:02.460 or the fine people story that the allegation of the president called the marching Nazis, fine
00:07:08.520 people, it should have a big flaming false, right? If PolitiFact is credible, that's what it would
00:07:16.580 be. So I look it up. And I'm looking for the logo. And it's not there. It's not there. The logo,
00:07:26.940 the little flaming truth-o-meter, is the primary branding thing that they do. They put it on every
00:07:32.920 story. So every story has that, except for the fine people hoax. Instead of telling you it was true or
00:07:40.920 false, they said, we're just going to show it to you in context. Here's the transcript. Why would a
00:07:48.420 fact-checking organization not check the fact on the most important fact of the entire presidency?
00:07:56.940 In my opinion, it's the most important fact. Because more than anything, it's what's behind the
00:08:01.840 imagination that the president is a obvious racist and everybody knows it. And here's the evidence
00:08:07.940 because of this fine people hoax. Think about it. PolitiFact left their fact-checking off the biggest
00:08:16.660 lie in politics. Didn't say it was true. Didn't say it was false. They just left it off. Think about
00:08:24.420 that. And that's the source. The CNN uses to fact-check them. So the CNN claim is that mail-in
00:08:33.780 ballots would not be a massive fraud opportunity. They might be debating some of the details of
00:08:40.740 that. And I would imagine the president is speaking quite approximately, as he often does.
00:08:47.520 So he may not be true on every fact. But is there any thinking person who believes that mail-in
00:08:57.580 ballots are not an opportunity for fraud? I can't even wrap my head around the opposing argument.
00:09:04.720 I really can't. So that's weird. Here's what else they say. Trump falsely accuses Obama of treason.
00:09:17.000 So again, here's one of the biggest, the worst criticism they could find of Trump's job performance.
00:09:23.260 That has nothing to do with his job. It's just something he said about Obama in a political season.
00:09:28.260 And he exaggerated, perhaps used treason when really he meant bad behavior, you know, not technically
00:09:36.300 treason. Is that a story? Again, if I run for president and become president, the best you could
00:09:44.860 do is to have your biggest critics have nothing to say about your actual performance on the job and
00:09:52.340 only talk about your personality. Talk about some unimportant things that you said that might have
00:09:58.660 been wrong. That's it. That's the worst they have on Trump. Are they talking about the economy?
00:10:06.200 Do you know what November 3rd is going to look like? Here's what November 3rd is going to look like.
00:10:13.380 The economy is going to be roaring back at record percentages, which will be misleading because
00:10:20.460 we're coming off a low base. So just as Obama's performance with the economy was misleading because
00:10:27.080 he too was coming off a depressed base, everything looks good from there. Trump is going to get that
00:10:32.640 same imaginary benefit. He's going to be able to say, hey, look, we had a coronavirus and things are
00:10:39.960 up X percentage. Somebody says the Dow is screaming up. I'll bet it is. So the president's going to have
00:10:48.540 an economy that's coming back. I don't think people will blame him for the president, for the economy
00:10:54.120 being depressed, but they might credit him for it coming back. And I think that would be fair because
00:10:59.520 he has been pushing for it to come back even at maybe greater risk for health problems.
00:11:04.880 And so the economy will look good. What else we got? Let's take China. How is the president going to
00:11:15.680 look in terms of China trade? Well, I think China's reputation is so bad that because Trump has been
00:11:23.600 tough on China in general, he's going to look smart because he was tough on China. And it looks like
00:11:30.800 his instincts about China have been completely proven true. So that's what about ISIS? ISIS is
00:11:41.460 gone. ISIS is completely gone. Do you remember ISIS? Wasn't there a time you were worried that ISIS
00:11:48.260 was going to conquer the world? It's gone, basically. I mean, at least territorially, it'll never be gone
00:11:55.080 as an idea, I suppose. So you can kind of go down the line if you were to if you take whatever you
00:12:00.580 think are the top five things, right? Take the top five issues. He looks pretty good. There was a
00:12:09.100 Rasmussen poll
00:12:10.000 that said that something like 24% of black likely voters, so it's not the entire population,
00:12:21.860 it's just the likely voters who are also black Americans, strongly approve of their president's
00:12:28.660 job approval. Do you believe that? So this is Rasmussen. Now, Rasmussen, I think, was the
00:12:35.860 most accurate poll of the major polls, the most accurate in 2016. And they're saying that
00:12:43.000 about a quarter of black likely voters approve or strongly approve of the president's performance.
00:12:51.860 Do you think that's true? I think it is, actually. Just anecdotally, and of course,
00:13:00.980 you know, anecdotally doesn't mean much. But it is my impression that he may have doubled his
00:13:06.540 support in the black community. And why wouldn't he? Why wouldn't he? Right? Because I think the
00:13:13.700 black community is looking at the same stuff everybody else is looking at. Do you think the
00:13:19.300 black community likes crime? No. Do you think the black community likes a bad economy? No.
00:13:28.900 Do you think the black, you know, community likes, you know, bad trade deals? No.
00:13:33.800 No. So, yeah. Why wouldn't he have doubled support, even against all the bad press? Seems like he
00:13:41.780 would have. All right. Some other things. So one of the things that the president retweeted
00:13:50.940 was my tweet in which I was tweeting about Sean King. Now, you all know Sean King. He's an activist,
00:13:59.760 one of the most famous ones. And he's a black. Would you say he's a black activist? Or he's an
00:14:08.300 activist for black issues? Now, the reason I ask that is that the, and I can't tell the story
00:14:14.300 without this. All right. So when I start giving you this context, the first thing you should say is,
00:14:20.740 how is that relevant to the story? Yeah, you're seeing it in the comments. So he is an activist for
00:14:27.980 the black community who has the interesting distinction of not appearing to be black.
00:14:36.160 Now, I'm not going to, I have no opinion of what his DNA is, right? So I'm not going to go there.
00:14:41.420 I'm just saying that the public opinion, other people, not me, look at him and say,
00:14:47.680 dude, you don't even look black. I don't think you're black. Now, I don't know what he is.
00:14:52.700 I'm not going to give you an opinion on that. I just think it's, it's, uh, it's sort of obnoxious
00:14:58.180 to tell other people what they are. So, uh, uh, so I'm not going to, I'm not going to get into
00:15:04.380 that argument. I will simply, I'll simply note that the most famous thing about Sean King is that
00:15:12.540 he's not black enough, according to his critics. Okay. And when I say not black enough, I mean,
00:15:19.820 he looks like a white guy. Again, nothing wrong with that. I'm not saying he's white. I don't know
00:15:25.620 anything about his DNA. I don't even have an opinion. I don't even care. Right. I literally
00:15:30.760 couldn't care about any of that, but it's important to this anecdotal story here.
00:15:37.320 So he was asked about whether, uh, the depictions of Jesus, who looks sort of white and European in
00:15:45.300 most depictions, if he thought that that needed to be changed to be more historically accurate. And
00:15:53.000 let's say incorporating the assumption that Jesus was, uh, less European looking and probably more
00:16:00.560 middle Eastern looking. And this is what Sean King tweeted. He said, yes, I think the statues of the
00:16:06.560 white European they claim is Jesus should also come down, meaning like the statues and stuff.
00:16:11.860 They're a form of white supremacy. Always have been in the Bible. When the family of Jesus wanted to
00:16:18.220 hide and blend in, guess where they went Egypt, not Denmark, tear them down. So that was Sean King's
00:16:27.580 tweet. Now here is the fascinating psychological part of this. The fascinating part is that when you see
00:16:36.600 this tweet, isn't your first impression that the slippery slope, you know, started with one statue
00:16:43.660 and then it was lots of statues and then it's, and then it's, uh, you know, Teddy Roosevelt and,
00:16:50.160 you know, and the next thing, you know, it's going to be Jesus. Is that your first impression that you
00:16:56.220 started with something that wasn't that big a deal? It was just a statue, one statue in a world full of
00:17:00.900 statues, but then it was lots of statues. And now it's my God, they're coming from my religion.
00:17:06.920 That's what it feels like, right? But let me suggest that if this had been the first and only issue,
00:17:14.340 if you'd never heard about any statues, there was, there were no protests going on. If the only thing
00:17:20.020 you heard of was just this point, Hey, why is Jesus always depicted looking European?
00:17:26.880 Wouldn't you think that was actually pretty reasonable as a complaint? Seriously, if it was the only one
00:17:34.980 you weren't judging it as a continuation of something, maybe you've got a problem with. If it was just by
00:17:42.160 itself in isolation, it's actually the most reasonable, it's the most reasonable complaint, which is what I
00:17:49.460 said. So when I retweeted Sean King, I thought to myself, you know, um, you know, in these times,
00:17:56.880 of great division and stuff like this, I don't disagree with that even a little bit. In fact,
00:18:02.460 I've thought that all my life. When I went to Sunday school as a kid, you know, I'm 10 years old,
00:18:07.720 and I'm looking at white Jesus, and I'm looking at the Middle East, and I'm 10. And I'm thinking,
00:18:13.860 how's this work? How'd you get this European guy born and born in the Middle East? So,
00:18:22.800 and then Sean King's characterization of it, it says it's a form of white supremacy. Now, if you've
00:18:30.680 been watching me for a while, you know that I've been criticizing anybody who uses the word white
00:18:37.020 supremacy, because it's just hyperbole, and it's really not in a lot of the examples that people
00:18:43.380 are using. In terms of how white people are thinking about it, anyway, it has nothing to do with
00:18:48.680 any of that. So I think most of that is just overblown. But in this particular example,
00:18:53.680 I've got to say, he's got kind of a point here. Because religion is, you know, what's more important
00:19:00.700 than religion? And Christianity being one of the big two, I guess, religions, it's super,
00:19:08.900 super important in the world and in people's lives. And sure enough, the racial identity of historical
00:19:17.040 Jesus was changed to make it white-like. How is that good? And somebody in the comments is saying
00:19:27.700 he was a Jew, and they could look any number of ways. Well, I think that that's a fair statement
00:19:34.080 that there are people who look all different ways. But I don't think anybody would disagree
00:19:38.680 that the artistic renderings of Jesus were intended to look like a European. Okay, I'm not saying it's
00:19:47.240 impossible that somebody could look a certain way, and it's different from the other people.
00:19:51.680 But I think you would agree that they intended to make him European. Don't you feel that that's a
00:19:56.900 safe statement? I mean, I'm not a historian, but it feels like that's safe, right? So I think Sean
00:20:03.340 King was just right, right? I will be happy to criticize him in places where I think he's wrong.
00:20:12.560 But why can't we just agree with him when he's right? And I think what's fascinating about this
00:20:17.320 is if you've taken the context away, you would say, yeah, you know, that's a pretty good point.
00:20:21.260 Maybe you should do something about that. Now, I'm not a believer, so it's not up to me. I'm not in
00:20:27.980 this fight at all. I don't, whichever way it goes is fine. I think, I think everybody should see Jesus
00:20:36.000 the way they want to, right? Why can't Jesus be exactly the Jesus you want to see? Why can't black
00:20:43.180 people have black Jesus? Why can't, you know, why can't the Chinese have Chinese Jesus? Because he is
00:20:51.020 Jesus, right? You're not exactly fitting into a, you know, fitting into a little box. There's only
00:20:58.060 one of them. So whatever, whatever the believers want to do with Jesus, that would be their business.
00:21:05.680 Here is a horrible little story. Oh, and so what's interesting about that is that the president
00:21:11.780 retweeted my comment, which was in, which was also agreeing. Part of the comment was, I said,
00:21:19.900 Trump just won 2020. Because if the protesters come after Jesus, that's the end of the election,
00:21:28.160 isn't it? Now, the Sean King thing probably will just stop with a, you know, one tweet. But imagine,
00:21:35.060 if you will, that it becomes a thing. Even if I agree with it being a reasonable thing that
00:21:41.640 should be discussed, it is the end of the election. Is there anybody who would disagree with that?
00:21:46.640 That if this Jesus thing became more of an issue than it is more than just a tweet,
00:21:52.460 it would be the end of the election. So President Trump retweets it. Do you see how clever that is?
00:22:02.100 Do you see how clever it is for the president to retweet that? Because in its, in its form as it was,
00:22:09.240 you know, just as a tweet, it's just a blue check person who tweeted something that has been said
00:22:15.840 before, not much to it. But because the president tweeted not only my comment that it would, that would
00:22:23.900 basically be the election, but he also tweeted the part where I agreed with Sean King. Think about it.
00:22:30.900 He didn't make a comment about it. He just tweeted it. So the fact that he would want to boost that signal
00:22:39.280 because it's good for his campaign is pretty clever. I'm going to say that was a, that was a well-chosen
00:22:45.360 retweet. Because if that gets bigger, the election's over. Here's a, I'll get back to some more Trump
00:22:56.040 retweets in a minute. There was an appalling story about something the New York Times did that is one
00:23:03.580 of the most despicable things you'll ever see in any entity, especially a news business. So the New
00:23:11.440 York Times decided to do a story about a fairly famous blogger who conceals his real identity.
00:23:20.080 And he blogged under the name of Scott Alexander, but that was actually his middle and his first and
00:23:28.160 middle name. So his real last name, he keeps secret because he, he's a psychiatrist and he doesn't
00:23:35.420 want his blogging, which can be a little more controversial to bleed into his real work. He could
00:23:40.200 get fired. His, his clients would have a problem with it. So the New York Times says they wanted,
00:23:45.340 they contact him to do a story about his blogging. Now I've talked about Scott Alexander's blog before.
00:23:51.780 It's one of the most brilliant and insightful things you've ever seen, like ever. That's a pretty big
00:23:59.940 statement, right? But it is one of the most insightful, smart, fresh views you've never seen before. I've
00:24:07.780 quoted him before. One of the most interesting thinkers in the world, really, and very well
00:24:15.360 informed. And the New York Times, of course, wants to do a story about it because he's so influential
00:24:20.580 and so good at it. But they decided they were going to dox him. They were going to do a complimentary
00:24:26.820 story about him because I guess the angle was he got a lot of stuff right about coronavirus before the
00:24:34.220 experts did. So it was going to be a complimentary story about how he got things right before the
00:24:40.160 experts were. And he's an influential, great blogger. And their policy is that they reveal real names.
00:24:47.700 And of course, he asked them not to. And they said, No, it's our policy. We have to reveal real names.
00:24:53.100 Now, they were going to write a positive story and destroy his life intentionally, knowing they were
00:25:04.380 doing it because it's just their policy. It's just their policy to use a real name. Yeah, we can't make
00:25:10.360 an exception because it's just our policy. And I don't know if they did or they're going to. I don't
00:25:18.560 know the status of this. I can't tell if but what what it caused him to do was to delete his entire
00:25:26.120 blog, not just a blog post, but the entire history of his blog, one of the most valuable contributions
00:25:34.300 to civilization. And he deleted it. He kept the backup. So it's not gone forever. But he deleted it
00:25:45.180 and, and wrote about it. Now, I could not hate the New York Times more than I do right now. It's
00:25:54.680 just evil. There isn't really any other way to spin this. If you're telling me that the New York
00:26:00.820 Times has a rule, and they just can't break that rule. Well, okay. But it's an evil rule. Do you know
00:26:09.000 who else had a rule? Hiller. He had a rule too. They weren't very good rules. We wish he didn't
00:26:16.420 have them. So New York Times, why don't you take your rules and shove them so far up your fucking
00:26:23.000 evil asses that we can see it in your eyes. You shouldn't even be able to stay in business after
00:26:32.260 something like this. Because it's one thing to do something accidentally. I'm very forgiving about
00:26:38.180 accidents. It's one thing to have a different opinion. I accept different opinions. It's one
00:26:47.000 thing to be political. It's one thing to be hyperbolic. It's one thing to fail the fact
00:26:51.260 checking. There are lots of ways to have bad behavior. But doxing a guy that you actually
00:26:57.260 like, and you're writing a story because of how much he's added to the world. And you know you're
00:27:03.060 going to destroy his life by revealing him, that is so fucking evil that I can't even wrap my head
00:27:11.200 around it. Amazing. And by the way, this guy isn't political. There's nothing political here. He's
00:27:18.600 literally just a helpful voice in the world. That's it. And they're destroying his whole fucking
00:27:25.960 life. Oh, it's worse than that. Because his patients will suffer. He's a psychiatrist with
00:27:31.720 a big group of patients. Do you think that they will be unaffected by this? No. No, they will be
00:27:37.680 affected. Fucking evil. All right. In the other thing that the president tweeted was just an article
00:27:48.120 I retweeted, which was that supposedly the only pollster to show Trump winning the state of
00:27:56.080 Michigan. So in other words, he has that distinction for accuracy in 2016, basically has a projection
00:28:06.180 that's completely different than the major polls. So you know, the major polls are showing Biden winning
00:28:11.040 by very large margins. And the guy who was the most accurate pollster on a state basis, at least for
00:28:17.980 some of the key states, says that his polling using a little different methodology, which has been
00:28:24.080 more accurate in the past, shows us neck and neck. It's neck and neck. And he suggests that there might
00:28:33.260 be more shy Trump supporters than 2016. That's right. It's neck and neck. And there might be twice as
00:28:44.220 many shy supporters who are not admitting who they're going to vote for than 2016.
00:28:52.580 So the president retweeted that because that obviously is good for him.
00:29:01.020 So let's see. Trump put a temporary hold on workers' visas from foreign countries. You know,
00:29:08.120 this is a topic I don't know a lot about. But I also don't understand why the tech workers are
00:29:14.980 being treated differently than other kinds of workers. I could see wanting to keep employment
00:29:23.040 good in this country if there were types of jobs that Americans could do and wanted to do. But in the
00:29:29.580 tech world, bringing people in from other countries, let's say India, if you bring in an engineer from
00:29:39.060 India, does that subtract from America or add to India or add to America? Well, have you ever met
00:29:48.880 any technical people from India? They're really good. I'm not saying that, you know, as a general
00:29:56.840 statement that every person from India is a technical expert, I'm saying that I've met a lot
00:30:01.580 of technical experts who were born in India. And they're really good. They've started companies,
00:30:09.140 some of the biggest companies in the country. Or at least people who were born in India started the
00:30:14.960 biggest countries, not necessarily just worker visa people. But my understanding of economics is that
00:30:22.600 the more people who have that kind of skill, the better. The more, the better. Because there's an
00:30:30.400 unlimited demand. There's no limit to the number of people who have money, and would like to do a
00:30:36.840 startup of some kind. And the main thing that's preventing them from doing that startup is that
00:30:41.700 they can't find a technical person to do the technical stuff. It's the number one problem. You
00:30:47.340 probably think the number one problem for startups is getting money, right? It's actually not, in my
00:30:53.960 opinion. Somebody might disagree with this. The number one problem is finding technical talent.
00:31:00.060 If you get that right, you can usually get money too. So I don't understand this, but I also haven't
00:31:06.600 heard the full argument. And it's a temporary restriction. We'll see if that becomes permanent
00:31:12.460 through the end of the year. I want to read you how CNN is currently characterizing the Russia
00:31:22.880 collusion coup against the president. So that's my characterization, that the Russia collusion
00:31:31.520 hoax was essentially a coup to remove the president. So that's the way I would call that.
00:31:36.840 So CNN, of course, you would say to yourself, well, they were certainly hugely embarrassed by covering
00:31:45.220 it as if it were true for, I don't know, two years or whatever, only to find out the entire thing was
00:31:50.180 was just a hoax and made up and the president didn't do anything wrong. And it was bad actors in
00:31:56.640 the government, etc. Exactly the opposite of what CNN reported for two years. So do they say, gosh,
00:32:03.680 we should have got that wrong? No, this is the way they're deciding. This is an opinion piece,
00:32:09.060 doesn't matter who it's on their, it's on CNN.com. And here's their characterization of that. I just
00:32:15.400 got to read you the sentence because it's hilarious. While quote, while some misconduct related to the
00:32:21.420 Russia investigations has been uncovered, that's just the first part of the sentence. Some misconduct.
00:32:27.100 Yeah, there has been some misconduct. A little bit. Hardly worth mentioning. You don't need any details.
00:32:35.520 But there was some misconduct related to the Russia investigation. It's been uncovered. Yeah.
00:32:42.060 And several former FBI officials have been chided for their handling of certain aspects of the probe.
00:32:49.060 chided. They have been chided. Now, CNN does not say that the FBI did very, very bad things as part of
00:33:00.880 what seemed to be a larger plot to remove the president who was legally elected. No, they say
00:33:07.720 that several former FBI officials have been chided. Oh, they've been chided. I don't even know where
00:33:15.840 you come up with the word chided. Could you come up with a softer word to criticize somebody? Let me see
00:33:24.400 if I can use these, this word. Joseph Goebbels, Goebbels, who was the Nazi propagandist. A number of
00:33:36.720 people have chided him for some of the things he did. Yeah, Joseph Goebbels, he was chided, got chided a
00:33:44.200 little bit. How about Ho Chi Minh? Killed millions of people. That's one way to say it. I mean,
00:33:52.800 if you were being unkind, you'd say, oh, yeah, he murdered millions of people. But if you were CNN,
00:33:58.560 you might say Ho Chi Minh has been chided for some of the things he did in office while he was in power.
00:34:05.720 All right. Let's see. Let's talk about the Bubba Wallace noose story. So the news, if you could
00:34:17.720 call it that, is that a rare NASCAR driver who was African American, apparently there are not many of
00:34:26.480 them. But Bubba Wallace claims that there was a noose hanging in the garage, the part of the garage
00:34:34.660 where his car was, I guess. And that was considered a racist act. And the NASCAR people got behind him
00:34:42.740 and really supported him, which was good. Now, I said to myself on day one, how many of you remember,
00:34:52.220 can you back me up on this? Because a big part of what I do is I make predictions based on persuasion
00:34:59.040 and then I check them. Right? Have I told you that you have to check your predictions because
00:35:07.140 otherwise you have no idea. You have no idea how well you understand the world. You don't know how
00:35:14.240 your filter on the world works unless you make predictions and then check how you did. What was
00:35:20.280 the first thing I said when I heard about the Bubba Wallace noose story in the comments? What was the
00:35:27.960 first thing I said? Where's the picture? Right? I told you that if there's no picture, it's a hoax.
00:35:37.660 We live in a world where we're bristling with camera equipment. Every single person, every one of you
00:35:43.880 has a camera within arm's reach, probably your phone, right? Are you telling me that people saw
00:35:51.280 a freaking hoax? I'm sorry, that they saw a noose hanging in the garage of a black NASCAR driver
00:35:58.860 and nobody took out a phone? Really? Nobody took out a phone? So that, so let me ask you this.
00:36:09.560 Who else told you at the beginning of the story that if you haven't seen the photo already,
00:36:15.960 it's probably fake? Now I have to say probably because if this is, if this turns out to be a real
00:36:21.180 story, let me be the first to say it's appalling. You know, it's a, it's a 10 and a 10. It's like a cross
00:36:29.380 burning on your lawn. We all condemn it. There's no, no hesitation, no equivocation, horrible,
00:36:36.400 horrible act if it's true, but without a photo. So two out of three, uh, uh, race stories like this
00:36:47.980 turned out to be false, according to the wall street journal, actually two out of three, it was
00:36:52.120 researched. So the odds are that any of these stories have a 67% chance of being false. If you
00:36:59.040 don't know, if you don't know for sure and you can't check it out yourself, that's the filter you
00:37:04.720 should put on it. Well, it'd be terrible if it's true, but there's a one in three chances true.
00:37:11.200 So there's been, uh, some of you are saying in the comments already, um, some people looked into it
00:37:16.840 and it turns out that there are photos and even live video, which is much harder to, to fake. It's,
00:37:24.360 it's possible, but you could do it, but it's harder. There's video of that same garage
00:37:29.660 with that, with a, a pull rope for the garage doors or a rope hangs down and you grab it and
00:37:37.440 you pull it to raise and lower the garage. Uh, I have exactly that in a utility garage where I have
00:37:44.500 a rope that I pull. Do you know what makes it easier to, to pull that rope? Just take a guess.
00:37:51.360 What would make it a little easier to, to grab the rope? Yeah, you put a little loop on the end
00:37:59.420 and there are actual videos from November, November of that same garage, garage number four
00:38:09.760 with the pull rope from the thing hanging down. And there in miniature about the size of a hand,
00:38:17.820 not the size of a neck, not the size of something that could go over a head, but more like the size
00:38:24.700 of something you put your hand through that was noose-like at the bottom. Now, if I hadn't seen it
00:38:34.460 on video, because somebody was just filming back in November and they were just filming the cars
00:38:38.960 and they go right by it and you see the, you see the thing hanging down and it's obviously just a pull
00:38:44.760 rope for the garage. Now, uh, somebody cut it off allegedly so that there are no photos that you
00:38:53.220 could take now because it was cut off. But back in November, you could, you could see it and it was
00:39:00.660 clearly just a, a, a pull rope. So that's the biggest, one of the biggest stories in the country.
00:39:06.300 And it's just so obviously debunked once you see the video, but how many people will see the video?
00:39:14.760 What percentage of the company of the country do you think we'll ever know that that was a,
00:39:20.040 that that's fake? Well, let's look at say CNN because, uh, let's see. I just, it's funny.
00:39:32.720 That story seems to have disappeared from the front page. Just checking, checking. All right.
00:39:40.820 Well, let me do a search on CNN and see if they've got any kind of a story. So all this new story,
00:39:51.180 see if there are any updates. Uh, nope. That story seems to have disappeared. I just did a search
00:39:59.320 on CNN's page and the story isn't even there. It doesn't exist as any kind of a story in a search.
00:40:07.400 Uh, unless they come up in the wrong order. We'll see. Oh, it is there, but it came up in the wrong
00:40:14.640 order. All right. Uh, I'll just quickly look at it and see if it mentions, if it mentions even the,
00:40:21.960 um, possibility that there are videos of this in the past, blah, blah, blah. People looking into it,
00:40:29.300 uh, strengthens our resolve. Uh, it's a horrible thing. Um, he set the race, blah, blah, blah. It's a
00:40:37.960 despicable act. This will not break me. Um, and by the way, somebody pointed out that the garages
00:40:46.540 in question have these, you know, multimillion dollar cars and tools in them. Of course they
00:40:51.640 have video. You know, they have video because, because it's like super expensive equipment and all
00:40:58.140 these garages. So there's video of all this. So we're going to know for sure. Uh, Phelps would
00:41:04.920 not say what, if any video cameras may have been recorded at the track. So the official won't say
00:41:11.300 if there was video recording. Why would you not say that? Is it for security purposes? No. It's
00:41:19.380 because somebody looked at the video and they know that there's nothing, there's nothing there. Uh,
00:41:24.960 people are enraged. Yeah. Okay. The sick person who perpetrated it must be found and exposed.
00:41:33.220 Yeah. So CNN does not make any reference to the fact that there exists video on YouTube,
00:41:41.380 which shows it in November as a handful. Do you, do you think that they ought to at least
00:41:50.080 mention that other outlets are treating it differently? So this is the world you live in
00:41:56.080 where the world is presented to you as completely fake. All right. So, uh, give credit to the last
00:42:06.460 refuge that I think did the most thorough job of showing photographs, you know, before and after
00:42:12.140 and debunking it. But there, there are other sources for that, but the last refuge seems to have been
00:42:17.860 all over it. All right. Um, and that's about all I wanted to talk about today. Um, some of you saw my
00:42:29.180 ring. I'll just say again, just for the purposes of completeness. I was supposed to get married
00:42:35.260 with Christina in May, but coronavirus delayed that and we rescheduled and rescheduled and we were
00:42:44.420 trying to figure out honeymoon and wedding date. And finally we decided that we would just call
00:42:50.920 ourselves married. We will actually get married, uh, within the next 30 days probably. Um, but we
00:43:01.020 decided that the government doesn't get to decide if we're married. You know what I mean? Uh, it's one
00:43:07.480 thing to say, okay, there's a process. Everybody has the same process. You have to go through these
00:43:12.240 things and then you're married. And I don't mind that if it's easy, if it's traditional,
00:43:17.360 if the bride wants it, if the family wants it, I don't mind doing any of that stuff.
00:43:22.380 But if the government is preventing me from getting married because, you know, there's a
00:43:29.680 coronavirus and it's just harder. I mean, it took us a long time just to get the paperwork, to get the
00:43:35.080 license because nothing's easy. You know, you can't go to the office in person and you got to do things
00:43:40.180 in the mail and there's a website, but it doesn't look like it worked. So you're not really sure if
00:43:45.320 it can through. And then you have to get a person who takes it in person down there for you and signs
00:43:50.120 it. It's like they've made it unnecessarily complicated. But does anybody know why the
00:43:55.500 ceremony matters? Does the ceremony matter just because you have a witness? I mean, I could get,
00:44:01.820 I could get a witness to sign a document. It doesn't need to be a ceremony. So here's the point.
00:44:06.700 Here's my point. I don't believe the government gets to tell me if I'm married. Do you agree with
00:44:14.380 me? Would you agree that the government is not in control of whether I am married? I'm married.
00:44:23.460 That's it. So it's not the government's decision. I don't want their opinion on it. When things are
00:44:30.340 back to normal, as soon as we can do the ceremony, we'll do it. So we'll wrap up the details. But don't
00:44:35.340 tell me I'm not married. I'm just not legally married. Somebody says, why at your age get
00:44:42.860 married? Just stay as domestic partners. Well, there are lots of reasons. But one of them,
00:44:48.360 and a lot of it has to do with the level of commitment you're showing to each other, etc.
00:44:52.940 But a lot of it is financial, right? Because you want to, you're both committing yourself,
00:44:59.100 and you have to know that there's a financial, you know, safety for both of you, etc. So that part's
00:45:04.940 just common sense. You have to get that taken care of. But the other part is just existing in a world
00:45:12.460 that requires labels. Yeah, the optics of it is exactly as somebody is saying. The ability to say
00:45:19.440 somebody is my wife is really convenient. It's really easy. It's clean. It says everything you need
00:45:26.160 to say. All those other words for it, this is my domestic partner, blah, blah, blah, blah. It just
00:45:34.660 seems to minimize the other person, and it just takes something away from it.
00:45:42.700 So, of course, it's a considered decision. But there are some just advantages to it. Just makes
00:45:49.920 everything a little bit cleaner in our current system.
00:45:55.940 Prenup, of course. Yes. Prenup is just pretty much standard business if you're my age and you have
00:46:05.520 assets. Somebody's asking about divorce and division of assets. No, don't worry. I'm an adult. I live in
00:46:14.100 the real world. I know all the risks. And we do what we needed to do.
00:46:26.040 Oh, did Project Veritas drop a new video? How about that? Let's look at it. Don't go away.
00:46:35.240 Don't go away. The best part of this periscope just happened. All right. So, remember I told you
00:46:44.760 last week that there would be some major red pills dropping? And I said, it's not one story. It's
00:46:52.900 going to be like a quilt in which there'll be squares of the quilt, which will be dropping from
00:47:00.260 the sky. And one of these squares may have just dropped. Let's say Facebook, Project Veritas,
00:47:15.120 and see what comes up. Project Veritas exposed CNN and Facebook. Is this the new one? No,
00:47:26.140 that's the old one. Let's see what Project Veritas has going. Project Veritas. All right. Why is this
00:47:39.080 not coming up? All right. Looks like this is the new one. Damn it. All right. We'll talk about this
00:47:48.820 tomorrow. But give me a chance to look it up. 623. Here it is. Daily Caller has it. Project Veritas
00:48:00.460 video shows Facebook content moderators discussing censoring conservatives reveals, quote, exception
00:48:08.380 given to Don Lemon for hate speech. So let me let me play it for you. Have you not heard it?
00:48:16.760 Let me play it for you. You don't have to see the faces because they're all sort of semi-concealed
00:48:23.440 and stuff.
00:48:32.620 Let me know if you can't hear it.
00:48:36.400 It's simple. As you say, be brave. I am more brave than I am scared of any trouble that anybody
00:48:44.180 could give me for breaking some stupid NDA. I think the truth is more powerful than any
00:48:49.020 NDA. To stick up for the voice of the people. Facebook's notorious for it. And they say they
00:48:58.060 don't, but it's clear that people's content opens up because it's been defiltered off the
00:49:02.200 queue. It's a very progressive company who's very anti-MAGA. If you see a conservative country,
00:49:07.940 you just get rid of it. Right. I don't give a s***. I'll delete it. You're going to do
00:49:12.780 this. You're going to do this. You're going to do this. You're going to do this. You're
00:49:14.780 going to do it all. Zach McElroy came to Project Veritas because of what he saw at his job at
00:49:19.660 Facebook in Tampa, Florida. He saw and filmed evidence of structural and cultural bias inside
00:49:25.940 Facebook discriminating against Republicans and conservatives. McElroy's story raises serious
00:49:32.660 doubts about the under oath testimony of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to Congress, where he claimed
00:49:39.180 Facebook has no political bias. What percentage of the flagged posts in the civic harassment
00:49:47.460 queue, as it's called, were Republican conservative? I saw a stark contrast between Republicans versus
00:49:56.120 Democrats in that queue. I saw upwards of 75 to 80 percent of the posts in that queue were
00:50:01.520 from Republican pages, politicians, journalists, and pages that supported the president or supported
00:50:09.960 conservatives. What does that tell you about Facebook slash cognizance algorithm here? Well,
00:50:17.840 certainly the algorithm is not human, but it had to be made by a human. So for 75 to 80 percent of the
00:50:25.980 posts to be targeting Republicans and conservatives, you can say it was a bot, but somebody had to
00:50:31.500 design that algorithm. So really, somebody at Facebook. Some people on Capitol Hill have expressed
00:50:37.740 interest in this ratio that you speak of. Are you willing to potentially testify under oath that
00:50:45.740 three quarters of the posts that you saw flagged were in one political direction? To the best of my
00:50:51.900 knowledge and ability, yes. To me, censorship online is one of the biggest issues facing us in the lead up to
00:50:57.420 the 2020 election. Well, insofar as I was not somebody who was working behind the scenes on policy, but rather
00:51:08.620 as someone who was enforcing policy, I saw everybody around me and I saw myself and I did a little bit of
00:51:17.180 comparing and I thought, you know, there really are not very many conservatives here. And because there are not
00:51:23.420 very many conservatives, I really don't think there are very many people sticking up for the voice of
00:51:26.860 conservatives at a company that handles all the, at a company that handles the flow of conversations,
00:51:39.340 basically a large portion of the discourse online. And we are essentially in charge of what gets said and
00:51:47.580 what gets stifled. Uh, you mentioned the election and the cons can talk a little bit more about your
00:51:54.620 concerns as it pertains to Facebook meddling or being involved in the 2020 election. Well, we know
00:52:01.020 publicly and as someone, even before I started working there, we saw plenty of, we've seen plenty of
00:52:09.580 statements from Mark Zuckerberg, uh, publicly about how they don't want to meddle in the election. They want to
00:52:16.300 give everybody a free, you know, a platform for everybody to speak freely. But we know that privately
00:52:25.740 they have very different opinions and we've seen that with the previous Facebook story that you guys
00:52:30.220 published. And I had no doubt that what he said publicly is not what he means to do privately.
00:52:37.820 Let's go to the Trump cartoon. This one here, is this something that you, you, all right? I, it's a
00:52:49.420 little bit longer than I thought it was going to be, but I will call your attention to it and say you
00:52:55.100 should all watch it because today, but today might be a lot different than you thought it was going to be.
00:53:00.940 Okay. So, um, uh, I think you're going to find out a lot in this video. I haven't seen it all,
00:53:07.740 but, uh, it's going to be a fun day. All right. That's it for today. I'll talk to you tomorrow.
00:53:13.340 Bye.